I find it disconcerting that within minutes of the shooting incident in a Washington, D.C., naval yard, our president and many Democrats are using this atrocity to advance their agenda for gun control. Hasn’t anyone noticed that these types of massacres are occurring in “gun-free” zones?

D.C. has very strict gun laws. Due to a law signed in 1993 by Clinton, most of our “armed” forces are not permitted to be armed on military installations. Therefore, this shooter took advantage of the vulnerable in an area that he knew would be just about gun-free.

The same applies to the Fort Hood shootings and all of the school shootings, including Sandy Hook. There have also been many would-be mass killings that were thwarted by a private gun owner. But the media ignores these incidents.

Apparently strict gun laws do not prevent mass killings. They simply make easier targets for criminals. One only has to look at Chicago for proof of this.

Kathy Ruell, Arlington

More shootings, still no change

These massacres go on and on. We pretend to want to do something and again and again, nothing happens.

We suffer from a very serious lack of leadership from Congress and a terrible defect of not wanting to admit that we are an extremely violent society that allows its citizenry to arm itself with almost any type of weapon imaginable. When someone then arms themselves, we act surprised when one of our 300 million-plus citizens goes haywire and kills a few more Americans.

We then hear for a day or so that “everyone in the office should be armed and ready for a gunfight in the cubicles at all times!” What idiocy.

But then we ignore it until the next one. We will then go through the exercise again.

How about at a minimum we elected leaders that possess the fortitude to do just a few common-sense things like background checks, telling some folks, “You can’t buy that gun because we as a society don’t think you’re fit to have a weapon,” and make some of our personal history, such as a diagnosis of paranoia, available to the authorities and the authorized sellers of guns.